Bitcoin Gold (BTG) is closer to a graveyard of Bitcoin forks than to a legitimate cryptocurrency

Bitcoin Gold hasn’t seen much action during the last couple of weeks. We saw it reach July highs around 9th, when its value briefly touched 496703 satoshi. Dollar highs were reached sometime later, with one BTG going for $34,04 USD on July 29th. That little spike near the end of the month seemingly implied that there could be a recovery ahead of Bitcoin Gold but this turned out not to be the case as the price soon fell back down, reaching the monthly lows of 340 thousand satoshi on the last day of July (lowest USD point was seen on the 12th, when one BTG=$25,25 USD). August has been equally as dull, and currently you can purchase a single piece of this cryptocurrency for $19.56 USD (a drop of 0.30% in the last 24 hours)/313396 satoshi (a drop of 2.80% in the same time frame).

Daily trade volume of Bitcoin Gold is at 1215 BTC at the moment of writing. The currency has a market cap of $335,183,777 USD, which puts in the 25th spot of coinmarketcap’s list of most valuable cryptocurrencies.

A member of the horde of Bitcoin clones/forks that have flooded the market in previous years is currently enjoying slightly heightened interest from the community, mostly because Coinbase Custody announced its plans to check out this coin as a possible addition to its portfolio. Coinbase Custody is a separate service from Coinbase fiat/crypto exchange; its mere purpose is to allow people with bigger bags of coins (aka whales) to safely store their wealth. As such, a potential addition to this platform shouldn’t really have a strong effect on Bitcoin Gold’s value or trade volume. Still, even mentioning the Coinbase name in the same sentence with a coin can cause said coin to spike in value, so we’ll see how things will turn out.

The coin’s creators claim that Bitcoin’s decentralization has been endangered by ASIC mining. The Bitcoin Gold currency has been created with exactly that in mind; its developers moved away from BTC’s SHA-256 and embraced the Equihash algorithm, one that is more resistant to ASIC mining. It’s now been over a month since the currency’s blockchain has upgraded/hard forked itself to use an Equihash-BTG algorithm which made sure that BTG can only be mined with a GPU.

So many forks – what is Bitcoin Gold? And what is Bitcoin Cash? Then again, there is Bitcoin diamond. And Bitcoin atom. And Super BTC. And some others we didn’t cover since they are not worth mentioning. And most recent one that actually seems legit – Bitcoin private BTCP.

This didn’t peak much interest in the currency. Partnerships like the one with Paytomat, Lightning network integration, coindirect, Hotels24, ZelTrez wallet and changehero all happened within the last month and didn’t really help Bitcoin Gold that much either. Partial blame for this sits on the back of the general cryptocurrency market which has been controlled by Bitcoin movements for good three quarters of the year.

But the other part sits on the back of Bitcoin Gold, which is basically a harder to mine Bitcoin. As such, there really isn’t that much interest for it around the market. A couple of BTG communities have arisen in the poorer countries of Africa and Asia, but none of this has been enough to bring the coin to mainstream popularity. It remains to be seen if Bitcoin Gold has any real ability to break out as a legitimate cryptocurrency or if it will end up on the graveyard of Bitcoin forks.

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